Scrupulous.
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News Epcot Forever to debut as interim show before full Reflections of Earth replacement
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
Scrupulous.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
I know I’m in the minority on HEA. It just doesn’t do it for me. I had thought it was just me but this summer when I saw Disneyland forever again I was like “yeah THIS is a castle fireworks show” and Disneyland forever isn’t even that strong compared to remember.
I think Epcot forever works better than hea. I also need to watch it again from a better viewing space like japan. My biggest problem is the kid. Some kid singing is fine..... but all the way through?
FerretAfros
Well-Known Member
Yes, and...?
As I discussed earlier, the name A New World Fantasy is a play on A New World Symphony. It's a throwback to a time when Disney expected guests to have a basic understanding of worldly cultural touchstones, and guests rose to the occasion.
A New World Fantasy ran from 1983 to 1984. Aladdin was released in 1992, meaning serious production (including songwriting) wouldn't have really begun until around 1988-89. Other than a couple words in the title, the two are wholly unrelated.
What's next? The revelation that Bob Iger is part of the Illuminati, and they're actually rolling out the New World Order one fireworks show at a time?
Dizknee_Phreek
Well-Known Member
Count me in that minority. I can't stand the castle projections. Far too busy, hard to tell what some of them are, and I feel like it's distracting rather than adding to the show. I wish they would learn something from Universal's Hogwarts projections, which to me are far more effective. Overall, I think Wishes was the better show for MK.
RSoxNo1
Well-Known Member
Except they used that song for familiarity first. We're familiar with it and that familiarity has nothing to do with Epcot. "A whole new world" is such a broad chorus you could argue that it applies to anything.
It was a bad choice.
Add in the fact that the show was only 11 minutes long and it further exemplifies an unwillingness to do anything for the fans. This was trolling at a professional level.
DoleWhipDrea
Well-Known Member
The show, IMHO, wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great, either. And I think that was done purposefully. Disney doesn’t want fans getting emotionally attached to this show since it’s only going to be around for 1 year, and I imagine more funds are being allocated to HarmoniUs. This is all a temporary placeholder while work is being done on the lagoon.
But certain choices made for the show certainly make it feel like Disney just doesn’t understand why anyone loves EPCOT. For all of the merchandising that has Figment prominently featured for the show, we never see or hear him - it’s children singing instead. Children singing in Disney nighttime shows isn’t new, and usually it’s charming, but this was a missed opportunity. But at least they realize that guests still love “One Little Spark”
I will give it another chance. When I saw it last night, my husband and I waited in our spots for an hour and a half, only to have two different parties shove in next to us on both sides minutes after the show started and push us in, when there was plenty of room behind us, and both felt the need to pull out their phones to take video and then play back clips with the audio going. I have a real love/hate relationship with today’s technology
But certain choices made for the show certainly make it feel like Disney just doesn’t understand why anyone loves EPCOT. For all of the merchandising that has Figment prominently featured for the show, we never see or hear him - it’s children singing instead. Children singing in Disney nighttime shows isn’t new, and usually it’s charming, but this was a missed opportunity. But at least they realize that guests still love “One Little Spark”
I will give it another chance. When I saw it last night, my husband and I waited in our spots for an hour and a half, only to have two different parties shove in next to us on both sides minutes after the show started and push us in, when there was plenty of room behind us, and both felt the need to pull out their phones to take video and then play back clips with the audio going. I have a real love/hate relationship with today’s technology
Dizknee_Phreek
Well-Known Member
Agreed. And I think the thing I find frustrating is that this was touted as a tribute show to Epcot. With the multitude of amazing music that has been in Epcot since its opening, there are many songs that would have still paid tribute to the Epcot that was, while still tipping a hat to the Epcot that's planned. Instead they chose a song that has nothing to do with Epcot and has never had a presence in the park.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe they chose that song before the live action remake came out. Thinking it would be a huge hit and everyone would love it and cheer when the song is used. Who knows. I've pretty much stopped trying to figure out Disney's thought process these days.
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V_L_Raptor
Well-Known Member
I saw the show last night, and I have a few thoughts. I'm less interested in writing a full essay than I am in venting my viscera, so here we go...
First, I had visited the Odyssey thing (best word I can find, honestly) earlier in the day, just in time to hear some plaid holding forth on how wonderful it was that "Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit" was "featured" in EF. Okay. I was looking at the bank of posters she was standing in front of and asked whether featuring on a poster meant that something was being put back. She helpfully provided me with a lecture on the superiority of Soarin' relative to the new Epcot theme, and then she ran away. (No, really. It was as though the floor opened up and she got pulled away on her very own sled for a war wagon someplace...) I then looked at the rest of the posters on display, and then I went to watch the video, and wow, that's some exquisitely hamfisted emotional manipulation going on. I'm not sure that how angry I felt was the desired goal, but all I could think of was just how much shown in all those posters had been removed in favor of comparatively few additions. Anyway...
I had been over at the Studios until shortly before the show, so I didn't pay any heed to the kindergarten announcements about kids watching their parents. Seems that's Disney's nod and wink to childhood nowadays. Lots of attractions now include similar language.
And then there was the show.
Let me start by saying that I didn't think it was possible to render something like condescension using a medium like fireworks. I must say, WDI continues to amaze. This was truly artful. Masterful, even.
I agree that using the kindergarten narration is not good show, for all reasons given previously by other commenters. I also found it rather ironic that in all the frenetically cramming clips together to get the classic EPCOT tracks into something resembling a sequence, those tracks that actually originally included young child voices did not make the final cut. Beyond that, I'm not sure why there needed to be a rearrangement with new vocal tracks for all of these songs, and quite frankly, instrumentals could've worked just fine in many cases. And really, I could've done without "Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit" if I could've heard the classic Imagination intro sequence. Whatever money they set aside for all the re-doing could've been better spent on something else. The archive would've been fabulous for this.
Maybe I misheard, but I got dropped out of the not-quite "Flow" when I thought I heard the line "Sing it proud" in the "Universe of Energy" re-record with Wayne Brady belting with a smile on his face. In any case, what I was hearing didn't resemble what I fell in love with all those years ago, and that's not good show for something that bills itself as a tribute. Words like "tribute" don't mean much these days, and that's symptomatic of larger societal problems, but Disney's mostly in the emotional manipulation business anymore. The goal is for me to feel like there's a tribute, not to produce a tribute of substance. I get it. It was not always this way, to be sure.
Aladdin... eeugh. Forget it.
I have a suspicion that the kites may end up disappearing before too long, if only because they're the main part of the show immediately run by human performers/technicians. Unless there's a way to automate them with drones, I foresee Disney deciding that the involved labor is surplus to acceptable expenditures for the temporary show.
Interesting how Figment is featured on so much of the EF merchandise but not in the show itself. I also notice that of the merchandise that I see floating around in the park -- and I saw enough EF stuff being worn that I honestly wondered if there had been a giveaway of some kind to build up publicity -- I don't see him on much of it. I can also say that I was not emotionally manipulated enough by the "tribute" that I wanted to drop $27 or so for a silkscreened EF ceramic disk-style tree ornament with him on it. If this holds for more people than me, I have a feeling we might find Figment removed from a lack of successful merchandise response. I haven't been following the discussions on the subject recently, but that's the sense I got from when I walked into MouseGear (and when I looked at the F&W souvenirs, which are great, but if they don't sell...).
A few commenters are impressed that Disney would go to even this effort for a "tribute" show, and that the development team had good "intentions." The truth is, intentions and effort are only as good as the results they produce. I could hand you a wiffle ball bat and send you out to the backyard with instructions not to come back for dinner until you were done pounding the side of the household oak tree so hard and so many times that you managed to chop it down. You may be great for effort and intentions, but you would never produce the desired product, and you would go hungry long before you ever managed to fell Ol' Ironbark. Quit giving effort points to a company that has always had the resources to do far better than it keeps doing (repeatedly!) in recent memory. If you're trying to project support for your own perceived shortcomings and your needs for the patience of others, stop it. Corporations are not people, and they should not be treated as such. Nobody buys a ticket at Disney rates to attend a park with a tagline of "Aw, you tried."
If I had access to the resources to put something like this on, I would have done things a little differently. (Not having the original scores available to me, unlike certain corporations, means that I need to talk around what I'm thinking...) Step one, get some screens out into the lagoon to take up some projections. Step two, darken the lagoon at showtime. Step three, lead off with the bass from the "You Make the World Go 'Round" instrumental from the park entrance music. Once the treble line starts, set off a few fireworks with some spark trails. At the instrumentals that substitute for the vocal track, project a show title and either continue the song with some visuals of the dinos or fade it out to segue to another piece with its own projections. Step four, choreograph pyrotechnics, kites, and whatever else floats your proverbial boat for the remainder of the presentation. Find a space for "Symphony of the Seed" and some winding animations for the projection, and run it into "Listen to the Land" with the children's voices on the chorus if there's truly a time crunch and full songs can't be included. Whichever songs play, use the projections to let the (supposedly ignorant) audience know at least which building housed the speakers that originally played the thing. Limit the show to one track per pavilion, but if possible, play the track. (If a municipality can contract to have a fireworks display that's longer and includes full songs, Disney has no excuse.) Include a medley from the World Showcase pavilions, but hire better people to stitch those together than whoever stitched EF. Last, but never, ever least, don't lowball "One Little Spark." Start it with the sound effect track from the ride intro, project the twinkling background from said intro, and let it play with a gradually more colorful animation. You'll have a proper singalong before too long, and quite possibly more than a few damp eyes. Feedback might even call some segments "genuine," which itself should show that it's just me fantasizing and not producing anything of record for TDO of WDC.
Ultimately, this was less of an evening entertainment offering than it was an advertisement for the new Odyssey... thing, in advance of the new developments said thing heralds. As ads go, it was amazingly heavy-handed and out of touch, resulting in more than a couple people thinking that they're not the target demographic for whatever the show was meant to communicate. It wasn't so much a tribute to classic EPCOT and its fans so much as it was a tribute to the shadows classic EPCOT could cast on the wall of a cave, if viewed from an improper angle by someone with advanced cataracts. This show didn't come from people who had the slightest idea how classic EPCOT worked or even what made the music memorable, but it maybe did come from people who were looking to buff their resumes with night show experience.
I probably should've just stopped at a final F&W booth for the night and then hurried home.
First, I had visited the Odyssey thing (best word I can find, honestly) earlier in the day, just in time to hear some plaid holding forth on how wonderful it was that "Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit" was "featured" in EF. Okay. I was looking at the bank of posters she was standing in front of and asked whether featuring on a poster meant that something was being put back. She helpfully provided me with a lecture on the superiority of Soarin' relative to the new Epcot theme, and then she ran away. (No, really. It was as though the floor opened up and she got pulled away on her very own sled for a war wagon someplace...) I then looked at the rest of the posters on display, and then I went to watch the video, and wow, that's some exquisitely hamfisted emotional manipulation going on. I'm not sure that how angry I felt was the desired goal, but all I could think of was just how much shown in all those posters had been removed in favor of comparatively few additions. Anyway...
I had been over at the Studios until shortly before the show, so I didn't pay any heed to the kindergarten announcements about kids watching their parents. Seems that's Disney's nod and wink to childhood nowadays. Lots of attractions now include similar language.
And then there was the show.
Let me start by saying that I didn't think it was possible to render something like condescension using a medium like fireworks. I must say, WDI continues to amaze. This was truly artful. Masterful, even.
I agree that using the kindergarten narration is not good show, for all reasons given previously by other commenters. I also found it rather ironic that in all the frenetically cramming clips together to get the classic EPCOT tracks into something resembling a sequence, those tracks that actually originally included young child voices did not make the final cut. Beyond that, I'm not sure why there needed to be a rearrangement with new vocal tracks for all of these songs, and quite frankly, instrumentals could've worked just fine in many cases. And really, I could've done without "Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit" if I could've heard the classic Imagination intro sequence. Whatever money they set aside for all the re-doing could've been better spent on something else. The archive would've been fabulous for this.
Maybe I misheard, but I got dropped out of the not-quite "Flow" when I thought I heard the line "Sing it proud" in the "Universe of Energy" re-record with Wayne Brady belting with a smile on his face. In any case, what I was hearing didn't resemble what I fell in love with all those years ago, and that's not good show for something that bills itself as a tribute. Words like "tribute" don't mean much these days, and that's symptomatic of larger societal problems, but Disney's mostly in the emotional manipulation business anymore. The goal is for me to feel like there's a tribute, not to produce a tribute of substance. I get it. It was not always this way, to be sure.
Aladdin... eeugh. Forget it.
I have a suspicion that the kites may end up disappearing before too long, if only because they're the main part of the show immediately run by human performers/technicians. Unless there's a way to automate them with drones, I foresee Disney deciding that the involved labor is surplus to acceptable expenditures for the temporary show.
Interesting how Figment is featured on so much of the EF merchandise but not in the show itself. I also notice that of the merchandise that I see floating around in the park -- and I saw enough EF stuff being worn that I honestly wondered if there had been a giveaway of some kind to build up publicity -- I don't see him on much of it. I can also say that I was not emotionally manipulated enough by the "tribute" that I wanted to drop $27 or so for a silkscreened EF ceramic disk-style tree ornament with him on it. If this holds for more people than me, I have a feeling we might find Figment removed from a lack of successful merchandise response. I haven't been following the discussions on the subject recently, but that's the sense I got from when I walked into MouseGear (and when I looked at the F&W souvenirs, which are great, but if they don't sell...).
A few commenters are impressed that Disney would go to even this effort for a "tribute" show, and that the development team had good "intentions." The truth is, intentions and effort are only as good as the results they produce. I could hand you a wiffle ball bat and send you out to the backyard with instructions not to come back for dinner until you were done pounding the side of the household oak tree so hard and so many times that you managed to chop it down. You may be great for effort and intentions, but you would never produce the desired product, and you would go hungry long before you ever managed to fell Ol' Ironbark. Quit giving effort points to a company that has always had the resources to do far better than it keeps doing (repeatedly!) in recent memory. If you're trying to project support for your own perceived shortcomings and your needs for the patience of others, stop it. Corporations are not people, and they should not be treated as such. Nobody buys a ticket at Disney rates to attend a park with a tagline of "Aw, you tried."
If I had access to the resources to put something like this on, I would have done things a little differently. (Not having the original scores available to me, unlike certain corporations, means that I need to talk around what I'm thinking...) Step one, get some screens out into the lagoon to take up some projections. Step two, darken the lagoon at showtime. Step three, lead off with the bass from the "You Make the World Go 'Round" instrumental from the park entrance music. Once the treble line starts, set off a few fireworks with some spark trails. At the instrumentals that substitute for the vocal track, project a show title and either continue the song with some visuals of the dinos or fade it out to segue to another piece with its own projections. Step four, choreograph pyrotechnics, kites, and whatever else floats your proverbial boat for the remainder of the presentation. Find a space for "Symphony of the Seed" and some winding animations for the projection, and run it into "Listen to the Land" with the children's voices on the chorus if there's truly a time crunch and full songs can't be included. Whichever songs play, use the projections to let the (supposedly ignorant) audience know at least which building housed the speakers that originally played the thing. Limit the show to one track per pavilion, but if possible, play the track. (If a municipality can contract to have a fireworks display that's longer and includes full songs, Disney has no excuse.) Include a medley from the World Showcase pavilions, but hire better people to stitch those together than whoever stitched EF. Last, but never, ever least, don't lowball "One Little Spark." Start it with the sound effect track from the ride intro, project the twinkling background from said intro, and let it play with a gradually more colorful animation. You'll have a proper singalong before too long, and quite possibly more than a few damp eyes. Feedback might even call some segments "genuine," which itself should show that it's just me fantasizing and not producing anything of record for TDO of WDC.
Ultimately, this was less of an evening entertainment offering than it was an advertisement for the new Odyssey... thing, in advance of the new developments said thing heralds. As ads go, it was amazingly heavy-handed and out of touch, resulting in more than a couple people thinking that they're not the target demographic for whatever the show was meant to communicate. It wasn't so much a tribute to classic EPCOT and its fans so much as it was a tribute to the shadows classic EPCOT could cast on the wall of a cave, if viewed from an improper angle by someone with advanced cataracts. This show didn't come from people who had the slightest idea how classic EPCOT worked or even what made the music memorable, but it maybe did come from people who were looking to buff their resumes with night show experience.
I probably should've just stopped at a final F&W booth for the night and then hurried home.
180º
Well-Known Member
It sounds like you had practically created your own version of the show in your head, in great detail, before viewing EF. To be honest, I’m not entirely on board with most of your suggestions as they wouldn’t, in my opinion, fix the main shortcomings. I don’t think it’s a case of asking for too much, just a case of your requirements for this EPCOT Forever being extremely, unusually specific.
I can certainly understand why you’re disappointed. It’s not a perfect or even great show. But even with its disjointedness, unsophisticated tone, lack of gravitas, and IP nod, it’s better than what I expected from the company that’s doled out those things in far worse form consistently for about a decade. From my perspective, EPCOT Forever is on similar footing with Illuminations 25, which had all of EF’s shortcomings, including a bizarre use of “Circle of Life.” Come to think of it, EF may even be superior to Illuminations 25. That’s pretty good for a temporary show! Just my humble opinion.
V_L_Raptor
Well-Known Member
That’s pretty good for a temporary show! Just my humble opinion.
Yeah, I know. They tried, right?
trainplane3
Well-Known Member
I would've been way more persuaded to buy the merch if they featured Figment in the show at all. 10/10 move Disney.
Dizknee_Phreek
Well-Known Member
If I could love this a thousand times I would. VERY well said and absolutely spot on. Your version of the show is exactly what classic Epcot and its fans deserved.
180º
Well-Known Member
Yeah, they tried, as opposed to not trying. And it shows, even if it’s not that great! HarmonioUS, on the other hand, I would consider to be NOT trying, just as a concept.
Now, RoE tried hard and succeeded hard.
While I don't particularly want a HEA clone for Epcot, after seeing EF, I'll take it.
Dizknee_Phreek
Well-Known Member
I feel like that's the exact reaction they want. They want us old school, die hard park fans in a position to just accept whatever.
Dizknee_Phreek
Well-Known Member
Exactly. And as others have pointed out, RoE was also meant to be temporary. Just because something isn't meant to last forever doesn't mean less effort should be given to it. Especially when you have as much money and creative power to put behind it as Disney does.
flynnibus
Premium Member
I feel like I'm in a bizzaro world... because I feel completely the OPPOSITE of your opinions of the SW show and HEA.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Hey that’s what make the world go round... different opinions. You do know I’m talking about the previous Star Wars fireworks show, the one with no projections?